‘No Hero’
I came of age in a time of
no heroes, long after the last wagons trundled out west, but you cannot choose
when to be born, when to die; you cannot always have the maid with the freckles
and the twinkling eyes in the long low Kansas light.
Caroline, they called her.
One day an Air Force boy
came striding into town, magnificent, and all the girls stopped but he only saw
Caroline.
When I was young I yearned
to travel, to move on forward, but the old folk needed help on the farm and
Aunt Maggie needed help with the cheese-making, Uncle Ferdinand with the cider,
the cousins with God. Next year they said; go on your travels when it’s time,
but there never was time; always a crisis, a problem with the soil, a disease
in the wheat, milk gone sour, a failure of apples.
Caroline came back. She
didn’t say much but something inside had broken.
I’m no hero, never have
been. This limping gait didn’t come from anything other than a ladder not fixed
soon enough, a fall from the roof of a barn, too much cheese eaten and cider
drunk when there was work to be done.
Caro – squeeze my hand, and
before this life passes smell the light, feel the chickens scratching out there
in the yard, taste the burning fields, and make believe they were set ablaze by
a tempest, by lightning flashing, not a rain of death dropped from on high by
an Air Force boy – no hero.
‘The Job’
She’d
given him a warmer kiss than usual that morning, so David knew that by noon,
something would be dead. He braced himself for explosions, poisonings, events
posing as accidents.
The
September sun pretended to have August’s strength, but it couldn’t warm him as
he walked down onto the beach. The familiar crunch of shingle gave way to the
softness of dry sand, then the weirdness of the wet, leaving puddles behind,
grabbing at the soles of his boots to stop him moving forward. The sea was
still too far away. He’d never catch it. He licked his lips. Salt – the taste
of Juliet’s lips a memory.
Somehow
he got through the day, somehow he managed to gather enough driftwood to craft
into a sea creature, part selkie, part Juliet. He wouldn’t sell this one. As he
worked, the local radio station’s anodyne drivel about the conference was
interrupted with news of a freak accident at the Grand Hotel; the huge
chandelier had fallen. The newsreader was unable to detail deaths and injuries
at this point.
David
went back to the flat. All Juliet’s things were gone. He’d asked her to marry
him last night, but she’d been irrevocably opposed to marrying anyone. ‘It’s
the job,’ she’d said.
He
would spend the rest of his life crafting her likeness out of driftwood.
Very well done! 'No Hero' has texture and tells so much of the character's history in so few words that hint at layers (naming 'Aunt Maggie' and 'Uncle Ferdinand' was a good move) and the story ends on a beautiful synaesthetic moment.
ReplyDeleteIn 'The Job,' I was thrown off by the reference to "the conference," but loved the description of David walking toward the sea that he would never catch -- more texture and layers, but in a different way than 'No Hero,' but the whole story is also endowed with sensory details that make it come alive.
Nice.
~bint